Let the Holy Spirit be your guide

 “When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.”

“Fundamentally, therefore, any man can, even under such circumstances, decide what shall become of him, mentally and spiritually. He may retain his dignity even in a concentration camp.”

“Man is capable of changing the world for the better if possible, and of changing himself for the better if necessary.”                 - Viktor Frankl

            Dr. Viktor Frankl was a neurologist, an Austrian Jew imprisoned at the Auschwitz death camp during the Second World War, who saw how people trapped in the most horrifying conditions ever created by other human beings could maintain their dignity, their attitude, even their optimism. He himself was the subject of brutal, experimental cruelties, and told in his seminal work Man’s Search For Meaning how during the worst of those tortures he envisioned himself speaking to students about those very tortures in order to remove himself from the pain and humiliation he would otherwise be suffering. 

"We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."         
                                                                   - Viktor Frankl

            The hard choice, to maintain that dignity and hope in the face of obstacles, becomes more difficult with the growing insurmountability of the barrier in question. Simultaneously, though, with increasing difficulty also comes the paradoxical sense that the easy choice is more and more unacceptable – perhaps because the more definitive the “defeat”, the more it becomes an intolerable pain in a person’s psyche. We fight cancer with more vigor than we fight the common cold.

            Similarly, we must fight the barrier that our sinful flesh raises in our quest to follow Christ, our quest to become more like Him in word and deed, the quest that the Holy Spirit leads all discerning Christians on once you’ve allowed Him a place at your internal table. The problem? Habits are hard to break, and when it comes to the sins of the flesh, those habits are deeply ingrained. We have work to do!

“It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.”                    - Franklin D. Roosevelt

            The good news? GOOD habits are just as hard to break as BAD habits, so if we can make the ways of the spirit as much of a habit as the ways of the flesh once were, it’ll be just as hard to slide backwards as it probably will be to reach the new nature in the first place. (Your teammate, the Holy Spirit, will be alongside you all the way – and unfortunately, the Adversary will be, too, looking for opportunities to encourage you to abandon your quest!)

So, how do you change your behavior? The method is simple; the execution is difficult. You need to choose ONE behavior at a time to focus on. This has been proven scientifically. The teenagers (of all ages) who claim to do better when doing three or four things at once are, at best, deluding themselves. Making you focus on multiple things at once is the major reason magicians, sleight-of-hand artists, and pickpockets can be effective. Trying to “multi-task” in this situation dooms you to failure because human beings cannot concentrate on more than a couple of things at once. In my career as a band director, one of the mantras of our marching band instructional system is that our student performers have so many things to concentrate on that they cannot possibly think of all of them at once and execute them each with excellence. Therefore, some of those elements have to become instinctive, and so the first week or more of our rehearsal time in the summer is devoted to making the marching technique so ingrained in their muscle memory that it will not have to be one of the items students “think about” on the field. With the music, performers must make the production of excellent tone instinctive in the same way so they can focus on the rhythms, fingerings, and balance as they perform. You see the same thing in pre-season football training, or in military boot camp. Perfect the basics first, and make them instinctive before moving on to other skills.

            Similarly, you cannot make fifteen “New Year’s resolutions” and expect to keep them. Choose at most TWO things to pay attention to and FOCUS on changing those until they become habitual. ONLY THEN can you move on to the next changes the Holy Spirit will want you to make.

            With those one or two items, make the effort to go out of your way to execute the new behavior in situations that will ingrain that trait into a habit. One of the habits of successful salesmen is to repeat a customer’s name five times within the first few exchanges during an initial conversation, so as to implant that name into memory immediately. This is exactly what you’re doing with your habit-breaking. When I want to change a behavior of mine, I find a situation that repeats itself regularly, so that I know when I’ll have the chance to practice that behavior. If you always smoke after lunch (for example), create something new that you intentionally do at that point – jog, eat a candy bar, whatever you’ll be able to replace the habitual behavior with and stick to. Keep doing that until it becomes an unconscious behavior. When you’re no longer thinking about it – then it’s a habit. And only THEN can you move on to the next behavior “modification”.

 “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”   
                               Ralph Waldo Emerson -

“Opinions are made to be changed – or how is truth to be got at?”                                 - George Gordon Byron

          The vast majority of people refuse to do what's needed to break old habits – smoking, drinking, overeating (my personal ingrained bad habit), negative reactions, seeking out destructive relationships, and so forth. But the truly successful people are those few who can adapt their own behavior to change for the better. Without that fairly simple trait – which CAN be taught by the Holy Spirit! – nothing anyone can tell you about your life will be of any benefit to you. 

Who you are is up to you. No matter who or what you want to blame for the events of your life up to this moment, they were EVENTS in your life… but how they AFFECT you is completely YOUR RESPONSIBILITY.
 

I spent my childhood and the first eight years of my teaching career in northern California, but for about the last quarter century I have been in southern Idaho, mostly as the director of bands in three different communities. When I taught at a previous school before coming to the town of Jerome, there were a host of difficulties throughout the district for most of my tenure there, but inside my own little enclave, my classroom, I eventually was able to create a pocket of relative stability in which my students and I were able to operate with some control over our own circumstances.

There are scores of examples of people who overcame true hardships to succeed in life – pick up any Reader’s Digest magazine to read about them. But there are thousands for whom a hardship became their crutch, the excuse they use why they “never made it” or “never had a chance”. That path may assuage your ego if you happen to stumble, but true contentment with life, true Christian JOY is no longer possible for those people. It’s the equivalent of parking next to a difficult, steep trail to the top of the mountain of life or success or happiness… and choosing to walk around the parking lot instead because the footing is easier. Safer, of course… but not satisfying.

A beloved friend of mine, now retired, is unfortunately my prime example of living a safe, unsatisfying life. He failed at romance once in college – and never dated again. His college career was interrupted by the military draft – and he never went back to finish his degree, less than a year away from completion. He lost his job when a business he worked at closed – and he never worked full-time again, moving in with family instead. A brilliant, kind, resourceful man, he let life pass him by.

“The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life.

Attitude to me, is more important than facts.

It is more important than past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do.

It is more important than appearance, gifted ability, or skill.

It will make or break a company, a church, a home.

The remarkable thing is we have a choice everyday regarding the attitude we will embrace from that day.

We cannot change our past, we cannot change the fact that people will act in certain way.

We cannot change the inevitable.

The only thing that we can do is play on the one string that we have and this string is, Attitude.

I am convinced that life is ten percent what happens to me and ninety percent how I react to it. And so it is with you....We are in charge of our Attitudes.”   - Charles Swindoll

            So, the question is, are you prepared to move ahead in your life? Are you willing to break those habits that tie you to the old nature? Is your mind still flexible enough to change at “your age” (whatever that age happens to be)? Or are you going to remain trapped in the ways of the flesh, the ways that will prevent you from ever truly following Christ where He would lead you? There’s so much more out there for us Christians, even in this life (let alone the next!) – why would you choose the tar pits of decadence over the glory that the Holy Spirit is ready to lead you to right now?

            This can be scary stuff, because it falls out of your comfort zone. But that’s the point, isn’t it? Your “comfort zone” is your personal set of habits, good and bad, and the Holy Spirit is telling you to change your “comfort zone”. Take your time. Let the Holy Spirit be your Guide. The more progress you see, however gradual, the more positive feedback you’ll get – the more confident you’ll become – and the more successful your holy transformation will be. 

            The Holy Spirit may be in charge of the business agenda, but YOU are the operations manager. Nothing gets done unless YOU make it happen! Those carnal joys we’ve all experienced briefly and watch fade away in the past won’t do the trick, no matter how often you try to repeat them. Only by following the Lord’s prescription for personal transformation can you not only find His peace, but learn how to recreate and maintain that peace over time.

“Come to the edge.”                            We might fall!
“Come to the edge.”                                     It's too high!
“Come to the edge!”            And they came,
And   he    pushed    them.

                                                 And they flew.                               –Christopher Logue

            Fly, little birds. Fly.